Ted Dunham, Instrument Scientist at Lowell Observatory is a co-Investigator on NASA’s Kepler Mission: The Search for Habitable Planets. At today’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC, the Kepler team announced the first promising results using the Kepler telescope. Five new planets, Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b were detected by Kepler with its high sensitivity to both large and small planets located outside of the solar system.“The quality of the data is unbelievable,” said Dunham. “It’s right at the theoretical limit of what you’d like to see. There are way more light curves — there’s a lot of light curves we’re seeing that also look like transits.”The NASA press release is here.